Baghdad – Iraq has cut cooperation with the United States on archaeological exploration because Washington has not returned Iraq’s Jewish archives, Tourism and Archaeology Minister Liwaa Smaisim has said.
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The fate of the archives, which were removed from Iraq following the 2003 US-led invasion, is a long-running point of contention between Washington and Baghdad, which has for years sought their return.
Smaisim, a member of powerful anti-US Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr’s movement, said in an interview with AFP that Iraq will use “all the means” to pursue the return of the archives.
“One of the means of pressure that I used against the American side is I stopped dealing with the American (archaeological) exploration missions because of the case of the Jewish archives and the antiquities that are in the United States,” Smaisim said.
The culture ministry says that millions of documents including the Jewish archives were transferred to the United States.
Seventy percent of the Jewish archives are Hebrew-language documents, with another 25 percent in Arabic and five percent in other languages, according to the ministry.
We can do you one better… NO MORE MONEY.
We spent nearly a trillion dollars of our treasure to free them and we got NOTHING in return, thanks to the idiot we elected as our 43rd President.
The Jewish archives should be considered a DOWN PAYMENT on what they owe us! Besides, why would we give them back something they are just going to destroy? They obviously didn’t care about these things before, so why would they care now?
let the iraqi jews in the US decide what to do with them.
The only way those archives should be returned to Iraq, is if it would agree to prosecute those involved in the public lynching of nearly a dozen Jews in Baghdad, in January, 1969; in addition, Iraq must agree to return the property and other possessions of thousands of Iraqi Jews, whom left Iraq, on their way to EY. In the absence of any agreement, the archives will remain here.
I hope that the documents have been or will be scanned and the files made available to anyone interested in them. so even in the worst case scenario and they are returned to Iraq and destroyed they will still exist if only virtualy.